


Concrete Kingdom

by Inaccessible Rail (strangetales)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: M/M, archive warning: it's an enchanted au, archive warning: jaded boy needing love, archive warning: lonely little girls, archive warning: oc mama jones, archive warning: prince david, archive warning: private investigator killian jones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:46:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetales/pseuds/Inaccessible%20Rail
Summary: The somewhat fantastically tailored stranger had come to this world looking for his newborn daughter (or so he said). Unbeknownst to the handsome, melancholy man with the motorcycle who no longer believed in happy endings, he was about to find his.





	Concrete Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> I have been wanting to write an _Enchanted_ CC AU for-fucking-ever, so here it is. Recommended listening for this story as follows: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons recomposed by Max Richter; “The Fear” by Ben Howard; “Little Waltz” by Basia Bulat; “All My Days” by Alexi Murdoch. If you’d like more, just ask! Happy to share.

Cordelia Jones believed in happy endings in the same way some people might assume that regular church attendance would secure them a seat next to God. Her belief was a remarkable thing when you considered the way her life had gone thus far—born into poverty on the Irish coast, sent to the States to live with a “wealthy” relative, abandoning all she had come to know in her short life, including her parents, who  _had_  loved her,  _truly_. She knew how it sounded to most people; a lonely, unloved little girl, sent away by two people who had never wanted her. Cordelia hadn’t been able to protest enough—had her parents sent her away? Yes. Had they  _hated_  her? Had her mother held the crying babe in her arms and felt nothing but revulsion?  _No_ , she would insist to her new friends, her adoptive family,  _they loved me more than **anything**_. All they had really wanted was to know that their daughter would live a better life than they had.  _To live my best life_ , she claimed, although, somewhere, in a small, dusty corner of her young mind she had occasionally wondered,  _Wasn’t my best life with the two of you?_

Her parents, had she ever spoken to them again, would have been disappointed to learn that their daughter’s life had not turned out quite so well as they might have hoped. She had a roof over her head; a competent guardian to ensure she was eating her three meals a day, but otherwise it had been a steady decline predicated upon a relentless spate of bad luck and missed chances. A school full of teachers who just didn’t seem to “get” her; classmates who made fun of her accent and her ostentatious shade of red hair—it was talent shows and writing contests where she was just never good  _enough_. Passable, solid work, but not so exceptional to catch the attention of just the right person. Just the right teacher, just the right judge, just the right visiting politician to look at her and decide to bless her life with good fortune.

In her younger years, Cordelia Jones could often be found sitting on the front steps of her aunt’s brownstone, pulling one title after another from a precarious, leaning tower of borrowed literature. Soon enough she became sad, and lonely, and briefly despaired, as most children might in the face of unrelenting adversity. But in the end, all she really did in the midst of her brief, yet profound, period of sadness was walk the ten or so blocks to the library and fill her bag with as many books as it could carry. Not just any books. No, these were the books with a certain kind of… flair. A certain kind of plot and character that could only lead the reader to believe one thing: that the world is good, that people are kind, that we all receive the happy endings we deserve as human beings wandering upon the earth.

According to Killian Jones, the less than optimistic only son of Cordelia Jones, his mother did not receive the ending she deserved. In fact, Killian Jones had grown to become diametrically opposed to almost every single steadfast belief his mother held; born with stars in her eyes, with hope in her heart—no, in Killian Jones’ mind, there were no happy endings. Life would simply churn on and on until inevitable death, and all human beings could do, himself included, was survive each miserable, unrelenting day until the next never came. Happily enough, you could perhaps squeeze in a stiff drink or two; a handsome man or a lovely woman, with soft skin or piercing eyes or rough hands. All these things, the creature comforts, they were there to distract you from the inescapable truth: that the world is not good, that people, at their core, are not kind, and that  _no one_ , not even his mother, patron saint of happy endings, would depart this world with a satisfied smile upon her weathered face.

Because Cordelia Jones, for all her talk of hope, had been left by all the people who had claimed to love her; her parents, who had only wanted the best for her; her aunt, who had gotten sick and died; the father of her child, the “love of her life,” who had loved the feeling of a poker chip in his hand more than he had loved her; and then, finally, her son, who had seemingly failed to inherit the “happily ever after” gene his mother had so viciously clung to all her life.

“I will never give up hope for you,” she would occasionally whisper to Killian through the harsh crackling of the telephone, “no matter how little you might hold for yourself.”

“Thanks, mum,” he would cynically reply, only just barely containing the caustic tone she knew was simmering beneath the surface. “Make sure you take your pills. I’ll be by to see you soon.”

The truth was that Killian Jones did not believe in happy endings because he knew how much it hurt to lose an ending you’d thought you might have found. Because he watched his mother, with her bright eyes and warm smile; her sturdiness and her faith, he watched as she tried, and tried, and tried—only to only ever be let down. Because his father, a man who should have loved his son and wife above all else, had left quietly in the night, leaving only a crippling debt for his family to bear. Because he too had  _thought_  he’d found love, only to be quite brutally reminded that it’s only a fool who thinks such things.

Killian’s mother had read him the same bloody book every night of his young life; right up until he became violently sick of the thing and shoved it into their garbage bin in what some might call a, “childish temper tantrum.” It had been one of her very favorites when she had been a child, unsurprisingly to Killian, as it did nothing so well as mimic his mother’s life, albeit with a far more triumphant end.

_Once upon a time, in a far away land, not so different from this one, there lived a lost, lonely little girl. This wasn’t new. Most lands, in an infinite number of worlds, have plenty of lost, lonely little girls. She wasn’t special, and she full well knew it. There was never any need for the loudmouthed innkeeper’s wife to remind her of that fact—but of course, she did it anyway._

In a somewhat predictable act of childish rebellion, Killian thought fondly of the “loudmouthed innkeeper’s wife.” He relished the chance to playfully sing her praises while his mother sat in expectant silence, a look of infinite patience resting on her face.

“Make fun all you’d like, my sweet boy,” she would say fondly before continuing on, “one day you’ll be old enough to know better.”

His mother always said things like that. Looking at him like she had some kind of life-changing secret that you only became privy to after a certain age. Only after you’ve left home, lived without the love of your parents; suffered loss—only then would you grow tired of falling back on your cynicism as a means of making the world easier to live in. Even now, at an age most people would consider to be adulthood, she studied him as if he were still a child.

But sadly no, not a child. Sometimes, he certainly wished he was. He didn’t often think of it, but there had been a time when he would listen to his mother’s stories and his heart would race. And he wouldn’t laugh—he wouldn’t think about whether or not it was “realistic, rather, he would hope. The Killian Jones of today, the boy who has grown into a man? He could not quite recall what hope had felt like.

_Our lost, lonely little girl—the hero of our tale? She thought happy endings were a myth, which is quite sad, for a child. If you were to think too long on the possible circumstances of such a child, why, your heart might darken a shade or two just at the very thought of it. A little girl before the infinite possibilities of the world? What could crush such a thing?_

* * *

Prince David’s kingdom is on fire. In the periphery of his mind, he knows that he should be concerned about that. The sound of swords shrieking against one another in the courtyard below; the smell of smoke and flame licking at the walls of the palace he had somewhat reluctantly learned to call home. But really, it’s hard to think of anything other than how light she had felt when he had finally held her in his arms. Somehow lighter than he had anticipated; warm and alive, overwhelmed by the sudden violence of this bright, loud, world on fire. With a mother quite viciously stolen away before they had even gotten a chance to really meet—a father who had failed to protect her. Just another lost little girl without a name. Not unlike the kind of girls he would read of in his mother’s books, often growing melancholy for days on end, daydreaming of what kind of tragic fate had befallen her.

 _No_ , he thinks, desperately, the pain in his shoulder growing sharper,  _I **will**  find you._ For Prince David, despite all of his hardships, despite knowing that sometimes, yes, the world is a dark and unforgiving place—he never gave up hope.

He doesn’t do a lot of thinking before he follows the cloaked man through the swirling, brightly colored portal that had opened up in the middle of his bedroom floor, but his heart does lurch briefly at the growing puddle of blood as it drips, thick, sticky, and red, off the edge of their once clean, crisp white sheets.

The last thing he remembers thinking before the world had gone quite literally black, was,  _Please forgive me. I’m bringing her home._


End file.
